Preparatory Work, Foreign Fibre Cloth

Christine Borland, Preparatory Work, Foreign Fibre Cloth, 2024, Yarn winders, bobbins, 25 x balls of yarn (hand-spun from flax, aloe, pineapple, jute, ramie and hemp fibres)

This sculptural work presents an interim stage in the production of a third hand-woven cloth as part of an ongoing series of cloths, produced in collaboration between the artist and a number of individuals and communities, extrapolating the stories behind the processing of different textiles and their journeys through history. The plant fibres for these cloths are painstakingly sourced, processed and spun by the artist and groups of participants in the projects which run alongside them. The warp (the vertical threads which hold the tension when weaving) of every cloth is made from linen, spun from the European flax, Linum usitatissimum.

The production of flax and linen, long-established in Scotland for use in the home, grew rapidly with industrialisation into both an important employer and a primary global export. During the eighteenth century, north-east Scotland had a monopoly on supplying rough linen cloth to the Southern States of America and the Caribbean, to clothe enslaved plantation workers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the industry had declined rapidly due to the new predominance of cotton, and other competing woven fibres, introduced from across the British Empire. Harakeke (New Zealand Flax) was one such fibre, considered suitable for industrial and commercial production. 

Some of the harakeke plants growing prolifically in Scotland today trace a lineage back to trial commercial plantations of samples brought from Aotearoa in the nineteenth century.  In 1870, a Royal Commission was set up between the two countries which saw substantial investment into the exchange of research, people, equipment and samples to accelerate the growth of the industry. Bound copies of The Report of the Flax Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Preparation of the Phormium Tenax, or New Zealand Flax, accessed by the artist in both the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, meticulously record these exchanges. 

Flax, aloe, pineapple, jute, ramie and hemp, were all included in an extensive exhibition, to demonstrate the findings of the Flax Commission in the Colonial Museum of Wellington, August 1871. Alongside others from across the British Colonies, they formed part of an exhibit of Foreign Fibres : those considered in competition with harakeke for the global market in the production of twine, yarn and cloth, all essential to the commercial shipping of goods. In this sculptural work and the related print, Practice Turns; Spinster, the artist explores these entanglements, pausing before the next stage of weaving a cloth; to listen, and engage in a dialogue of making with the local textile community. 

The sculptural installation, Preparatory Work, Foreign Fibre Cloth converses with the related photographic print Practice Turns; Spool Winder, centring the same scenario of threads and bobbin winders, to operate as twinned autotheoretical works. Autotheory is the joining of autobiography with critical theory, in which the practitioner employs their lived experiences, artistic materials and processes to think and speculate with. The two related works employ the artist’s tangible interactions with fibres as her means to negotiate and share in their colonial legacies. The autobiographical body which holds these stories, is present in the photographic print but not within the gallery installation, locating the artist as corporeally both present and absent.